HBase is the Hadoop database. Think of it as a distributed scalable Big Data store.
Use HBase when you need random, realtime read/write access to your Big Data. This project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, column-oriented store modeled after Google's Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by Chang et al. Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, HBase provides Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop and HDFS.
HBase provides:
See the Architecture Overview, the Apache HBase Reference Guide FAQ, and the other documentation links on the left!
May 22nd, 2012 HBaseCon2012 in San Francisco
January 23rd, 2012 HBase 0.92.0 released. Download it!
January 19th, 2012 Meetup @ EBay
December 23rd, 2011 HBase 0.90.5 released. Download it!
November 29th, 2011 Developer Pow-Wow in SF at Salesforce HQ
November 7th, 2011 HBase Meetup in NYC (6PM) at the AppNexus office
August 22nd, 2011 HBase Hackathon (11AM) and Meetup (6PM) at FB in PA
June 30th, 2011 HBase Contributor Day, the day after the Hadoop Summit hosted by Y!
June 8th, 2011 HBase Hackathon in Berlin to coincide with Berlin Buzzwords
May 19th, 2011 HBase 0.90.3 released. Download it!
April 12th, 2011 HBase 0.90.2 released. Download it!